Cloud Atlas by Liam Callahan
This debut book by Liam Callahan is written confidently and masterfully.
The name is apt, as the story does at times feel encased in a layer of semi-transparent clouds, now realistic and now, dealing with things which are not quite here or there.. There is a sense of unreality, familiar both in the way we all learn our way through life, especially when confronted with things absolutely out of scope of our previous experience, and in the way, sometimes, during the night one can't help feeling strange presences in the next room during the night, and tries to explain them away with logical reasons.
Sometimes, to keep your sanity, you need to embrace the strange and unfamiliar.
Where speaking about certain writers, you would describe their style as magic realism - usually iin these cases you would mean writers of Latin American descent, but here, is a sample of an Alaskan magical realism.
Amazon synopsis:
Set against the magnificent backdrop of Alaska in the waning days of World War II, The Cloud Atlas is an enthralling debut novel, a story of adventure and awakening-and of a young soldier who came to Alaska on an extraordinary, top-secret mission…and found a world that would haunt him forever.
Drifting through the night, whisper-quiet, they were the most sublime manifestations of a desperate enemy: Japanese balloon bombs. Made of rice paper, at once ingenious and deadly, they sailed thousands of miles across the Pacific...and once they started landing, the U.S. scrambled teams to find and defuse them, and then keep them secret from an already anxious public. Eighteen-year-old Louis Belk was one of those men. Dispatched to the Alaskan frontier, young Sergeant Belk was better trained in bomb disposal than in keeping secrets. And the mysteries surrounding his mission only increased when he met his superior officer-a brutal veteran OSS spy hunter who knew all too well what the balloons could do-and Lily, a Yup’ik Eskimo woman who claimed she could see the future.
By the way, the backbone of the book - the story of the japanese ballon bombs is true, and that is also quite amazing.
I think I have some quotes earmarked in the book, but as my ereader is at home, and I am in the mood to write this short review - I will, maybe, post the quotes later.